Ruth and Edna

Some dreams are the opposite of a nightmare. I call them blessed dreams. My first blessed dream happened at the dusk of my teenage years. It was brief and involved my great aunts Ruth and Edna. This dream was exceptionally lucid, with a false awakening that made it seem even more real. While it is well established that very unusual things can be dreamed, their appearance was rare indeed. I have never met Ruth and Edna because they died in a car accident along with my great grandpa back in 1936, and I have only seen their death portraits.

In the dream, I walked into the long hallway of my parents’ house, and Ruth and Edna were bouncing a ball back and forth at the opposite end. The ball and their white dresses were embedded with an ethereal glitter. Seeing them provoked the most intense ambivalence I have ever felt, awake or asleep. I was shocked at their presence, but I was also overwhelmed by the profound joy they radiated. Before they noticed me, I realized I must be dreaming and forced myself awake because the emotion of this dream was so strong it could be withstood for just a brief time, or so it seemed at the time

There is a coda to this first blessed dream. When the fatal car accident happened back in 1936, my great grandpa’s extended family could not be found. The identity of his parents or siblings was a mystery until this year. I began building a family tree because I had taken a couple of DNA tests designed to find relatives and estimate ethnicity (23andme and AncestryDNA). At first, I had no close matches that revealed my great grandfather’s family. I mentioned my predicament to a friend who unfortunately passed away a week later. Now I get to the part of this story that almost begs disbelief, but I suppose that the simple explanation may be that I had all the information I needed but my dreaming mind was able to sort through it to offer a solution. I next had a blessed dream in which my recently departed friend told me, “You will find him with his mother.”

Right after I woke up, I looked once again at my great grandpa’s marriage certificate. I considered that it was possible that he was not born with the surname he used at the time of that marriage, so I began my search again with a focus on his mother’s first and maiden name. Within an hour, I discovered that my great grandfather was a man who disappeared from Minneapolis in 1923 and that he used a different last name for the remaining 13 years of his life. My extended family helped me contact the descendants of his first family, who I am happy to report also did DNA testing to help confirm my great grandpa’s real identity.